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Ask.com does guerrilla marketing to take on a guerrilla in the search arena

This entry was written by one of our members and submitted to our YouMoz section.The author's views below are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz.

I am often heartened by the strangest things – a scone for brekkie, when the machine at work spits out moccaccino instead of cappuccino (when the service guy swaps milk powder for chocolate powder), someone giving me a crème egg (despite the quality of the chocolate)…. I was heartened to discover the culprit behind the ad campaign that sent me a free t-shirt (that will only fit me when I lose another 100 lbs or so) was Ask.com, my favourite underdog of search. Sort of. While some of you guys (pointing no fingers) were enraptured by MissDewey.com (and possibly looking up her porn back catalogue), I was trying to win a moped on Ask.com and discovering new avenues to waste away hours - by clicking on random related searches.

As a long-time Ask.com user therefore, I was delighted to (receive my free t-shirt that only fits small children…NOT) discover that the people who were plastering the underground (the subway system in London, UK), painting on the street and projecting images on Parliament, were Ask.com Their ad campaign was designed to look like some underground network was trying to start a rebellion against information being controlled by one company (how about the fact that almost all news outlets worldwide are owned by a small handful of corporations…?). The unfortunate part is that the feeling of deception and outrage have seemingly overcome the realisation that information is controlled by one company (sort of). Sometimes we are happier in our illusions.

The ad posters are simple white background with black images and red and black text with the Ask.com button (sans Ask.com text). The posters are designed to make people think about who is serving up their search results by asking if one company should really control the web’s information. The site itself encourages people to try alternate search engines – even live.com. The television commercials – designed to look as though someone has hijacked the signal - have a great underground movement feel to them. The set reminds me a little too much of Johnny Mnemonic, and they seem to be trying to emulate the underground movements in movies a little too much.

Will this convert people away from Google? I highly doubt it. The clear deception of the public who were duped in to believing this was a real underground movement, only to find out it was a search engine, are more likely to be put off than to switch. Google is used in interesting ways and in the UK, it is used for 75% of all searches. In fact, it is now used as a way of accessing a website by putting the URL in to the search box. When attempting to access a site, a significant number of people (3 out of 5 in one study) will enter the URL in to Google’s search box. If the site has not yet been indexed, the user assumes the site does not exist. Such is the power and market penetration of Google.

Ask.com feels they have nothing to lose – in fact, they do. They have 4.6% of all searches done in the UK to lose, and the goodwill of searchers like me. They may have misjudged reaction to this campaign. Not even going by the website comments, the feeling expressed by friends and colleagues is that this campaign is a real turn off. I thought it was cute but even I was slightly put off by it, and I’m an Ask.com fan. I feel they have lost a lot through this campaign and may have made a huge mistake. If you’ve seen the adverts, I’d love to hear your opinion.

18 Comments

Interesting post deCabbit, not being in the UK it took me a few searches to figure out what exactly was being talked about. I think I would feel kinda the same way though, like I had been tricked into trying something I wasn't interested in. Over at search engine land this has been covered and they have a video to help those of us who haven't seen the ads understand. The radio ad at the end was the most eye-opening to me, we're protesting google by using ask? The whole campaign just feels a bit off to me.

I was really disappointed by Ask. I tried to be all rooting for the underdog about it but it was just too deceptive and reports are in that some shop owner got his window kicked in when refusing to have the information posted in a wondow.

Another was painting ask.com on a shop window while another person was inside distracting people.

It is stuff like this that turned me off most. The ads just were dull and really not exciting enough to catch my imagination.

I think Ask have lost out big time with this scheme and will lose search market share.

I've been kind of rooting for Ask to gain more market share since I generally like many of the things they do. I'm not in the UK and so not familiar with this particular marketing campaign, but everything I've read indicates it's not going well.

From your description it seems as though a lot of deception is going on and Ask should have known they would be found out and the backlash wouldn't be good,

Haven't big companies realized yet that it's honesty and transparency that works when marketing online? Especially when you're marketing a tech related product.

I think lack of transparency was the worst thing they could have done. If they had done something like this but had been transparent about it, this could have been a wildly more successful campaign.

It was when I heard about the window being smashed when a shop refused to place an Ask poster that I realised it had gone too far. Painting on a window is one thing - criminal damage like that is just, well, illegal.

I think the US Ask campaign sounds better than the one here in the UK.

I just wish Ask had been more truthful. The TV commercials are fab and if the whole campaign had been created like that I am positive more people would have switched.

I was looking for related bump in traffic from Ask to any of our client sites to see if their advertising was working. Couldn't find anything (not that there is a lot usually...). Anyone else seen any increase since they started the campaign?

If the campaign started early March, we can see no related spike or even increase in traffic. If anything there was a decrease.

We had been working up towards an increase since Jan where it was at a low. I adjusted some things and we ranked better for certain target terms and we saw the uptick in Feb. March was higher but was our top month. April shows good signs as well but so far Easter is problematic.

Nothing I can attribute to the campaign as our ranking improved significantly at the time we saw traffic uptick.

The ADs appear on the London Tube. There's NO text mentioning ASK on the one I saw - it's put up in such a way as to appear to have been fly posted by the "revolutionaries" rather (as is actually the case of couse) stuck up by a bill poster on behalf of a paying AD agency.

I was intrigued enough to visit their site when I got home from London, but didn't stay very long! It's fairly transparent as to what is going on from the front page. My daughters' guess was that is was "M" being attacked, but I saw it as "G" and of course the comments all over the site confirmed my suspicions right away.

In a sense, the adverts gave it away a bit usinmg company colours and the Ask red dot though it was also easy to not get the joke. They did identify themselves on terms and conditions but everywhere else made it look like an underground movement.

I don't know if it is really that much of a flash in the pan. I do still see the TV adverts (which I like more than the other advertising) but I think the deception will turn people off for a long time.

It may become a very good case study for why search engines should not use deceitful tacticts like this in any way.

Yahoo! does identify itself on most of its properties even if logon isn't harmonised.

I'm not a big fan of their US ads, and they explicitely state their name in those. I actually though that they would have given up on them by now, they've not had any affect on their overall market share and they just annoy me, so what's the sense in throwing good money after bad?

Marketing - the skill of throwing good money after bad tha making the boss think it is a good thing

;-)

I really think they did a lot of damage here in the UK as their ads tried to make them seem like revolutionaries when really they were an old brand, rebranded, with a tiny market share trying to use marketing to increase it.

Bad marketing in my opinion.

I really want to keep loving Ask but I'm having trouble after the whole window being smashed in and the paint on the window...